Language as a System of Signs

Meaning as sign
Kramsch C. Language and Culture. –
Oxford University Press, 1998. – pp. 15-23.
Language can mean in two fundamental ways, both of which are intimately linked to culture: through what it says or what it refers to as an encoded sign (semantics), and through what it does as an action in context (pragmatics). We consider in this chapter how language means as an encoded sign.
The linguistic sign
The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is humans' capacity to create signs that mediate between them and their environment. Every meaning-making practice makes use of two elements: a signifier and a signified. Thus, for example, the sound /rouz/ or the four letters of the word 'rose' are signifiers for a concept related to an object in the real world with a thorny stem and many petals. The signifier (sound or word) in itself is not a sign unless someone recognizes it as such and relates it to a signified (concept); for example, for someone who doesn't know English, the sound /rouz/ signifies nothing because it is not a sign, but only a meaningless sound. A sign is therefore neither the word itself nor the object it refers to but the relation between the two.
There is nothing necessary about the relation between a given word as linguistic signifier and a signified object. The word 'rose' can be related to flowers of various shapes, consistencies, colors, and smells, it can also refer to a color, or to a smell. Conversely, the object 'rose' can be given meaning by a variety of signifiers: Morning Glory, Madame Meillon, flower, die Rose, une rose. Because there is nothing inherent in the nature of a rose that makes the four letters of its English signifier more plausible than, say, the five letters of the Greek word сьдьх, the linguistic sign has been called arbitrary. Furthermore, because there is no one-to-one correspondence, no perfect fit between signifier and signified, the dualism of the linguistic sign has been called asymmetrical.
The meaning of signs
What is the nature of the relation between signifier and signified? In other words, how do signs mean? When Emily Dickinson*uses in her poem words like 'rose', or 'rosemary', these words point to (are the referents of) objects that grow in the real gardens of the real world. They refer to a definable reality. Their meaning, that can be looked up in the dictionary, is denotative. On the other hand, the meaning of 'rose' and 'rosemary' is more than just the plants they refer to. It is linked to the many associations they evoke in the minds of their readers: a rose might be associated with love, passion, beauty; rosemary might be associated with the fragrance of summer and the preservation of dried herbs. Both words draw their meaning from their connotations.
In addition to denotation and connotation, there is a third kind of meaning that words can entertain with their objects. For, as with all signifiers, they not only point to, and are associated with, their objects, they can also be images (or icons) of them. So, for example, exclamations like 'Whoops!', 'Wow!', 'Whack!' don't so much refer to emotions or actions as they imitate them (onomatopoeia). Their meaning is therefore iconic. The Dickinson poem makes full use of iconic meanings. For example, the sound link between the /s/ of 'screw', 'summer', and 'ceaseless rosemary' creates a world of sound signs that replicates the crushing sound of a rose press, thus enhancing iconically the denotative and the connotative meanings of the individual words. In addition, by transforming the 'rose' into the word 'rosemary', the poem offers an icon of the metamorphosis it is talking about with regard to roses. As we can see in this poem, any linguistic sign may entertain multiple relations to its object, that may be simultaneously of a denotative, connotative, or iconic kind.
Cultural encodings
All three types of signs correspond to ways in which members of a given discourse community encode their experience. In that regard, the code is not something that can be separated from its meanings.
Different signs denote reality by cutting it up in different ways, as Whorf would say. For example, table, Tisch, mesa denote the same object by reference to a piece of furniture, but whereas the English sign 'table' denotes all tables, Polish encodes dining tables as stol, coffee tables or telephone tables as stolik. British English encodes anything south of the diaphragm as 'stomach', whereas in American English a 'stomachache' denotes something different from a 'bellyache'. Similarly, Bavarian German encodes the whole leg from the hip to the toes through one sign, das Bein, so that 'Mein Bein tut weh' might mean 'My foot hurts', whereas English needs at least three words 'hip', 'leg', or 'foot'. Cultural encodings can also change over time in the same language. For example, German that used to encode a state of happiness as glьcklich, now encodes deep happiness as glьcklich, superficial happiness as happy, pronounced /hepi/.
The encoding of experience differs also in the nature of the cultural associations evoked by different linguistic signs. For example, although the words 'soul' or 'mind' are usually seen as the English equivalents of the Russian word dusha, each of these signs is differently associated with their respective objects. For a Russian, not only is dusha used more frequently than 'soul' or 'mind' in English, but through its associations with religion, goodness, and the mystical essence of things it connotes quite a different concept than the English. Studies of the semantic networks of bilingual speakers makes these associations particularly visible. For example, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish have been shown to activate different associations within one of their languages and across their two languages. In English they would associate 'house' with 'window', and 'boy' with 'girl', but in Spanish they may associate casa with madre, and muchacho with hombre. But even within the same speech community, signs might have different semantic values for people from different discourse communities. Anglophone readers of Emily Dickinson's poem who happen not be members of her special discourse community, might not know the denotational meaning of the word 'Attar', nor associate 'rosemary' with the dead. Nor might the iconic aspects of the poem be evident to them. Even though they may be native speakers of English, their cultural literacy is different from that of Emily Dickinson's intended readers.
Words can also serve as culturally informed icons for the concepts, objects, or persons they signify. For example, English speakers who belong to certain discourse communities may intensify denotative meanings by iconically elongating the vowel of a word, for example, 'It's beau::::::tiful!'. In French, intensification of the sound is often done not through elongation of the vowel but through rapid reiteration of the same form: 'Vite vite rite rile rife! Dйpкchez-vous!' (Quick! Hurry up!). These different prosodic encodings form distinct ways of speaking that are often viewed as typically English or French. Similarly, onomatopoeia links objects and sounds in seemingly inevitable ways for members of a given culture. For example, the English sounds 'bash', 'mash', 'smash', 'crash', 'dash', 'lash', 'clash', 'trash', 'splash', 'Hash' are for English speakers icons for sudden, violent movements or actions. A speaker of another language might not hear in the sound /жт/ any such icon at all; for a French speaker the words hache, tache, crache, sache, cache, vache have no semantic relationship despite similar final sounds. A French-educated speaker of French might, however, be inclined to hear in words like siffler and serpent icons of their objects because of the initial similar sounding /s/, but also, as we see below, because of the cultural association with a prior text—the famous line from Racine's Andromaque: 'Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur nos tкtes?' ('But what are these serpents hissing above our heads?').
It is important to mention that the differences noted above among the different languages are not only differences in the code itself, but in the semantic meanings attributed to these different encodings by language-using communities. It is these meanings that make the linguistic sign into a cultural sign.
Semantic cohesion
We have seen how signs relate words to the world in ways that are generally denotative of common cultural objects, or particularly connotative of other objects or concepts associated with them, or simply iconic. But, as a sign, a word also relates to other words or signs that give it a particular value in the verbal text itself or co-text. Beyond individual nouns and sounds, words refer to other words by a variety of cohesive devices that hold a text like the Dickinson poem together: pronouns ('it'), demonstratives ('this'), repetition of the same words from one sentence to the next (for example, 'The Attar from the Rose ... The general Rose ... In ceaseless Rosemary') or same sounds from one line to the next (for example, the sound /l/ in 'Lady's Drawer', 'the Lady lie'), recurrence of words that relate to the same idea (for example, 'Suns', 'summer'; 'essential Oils', 'Attar'), conjunctions (for example, 'but', 'when'). These devices capitalize on the associa-tive meanings or shared connotations of a particular community of competent readers who readily recognize the referent of the pronoun 'it' and the lexical reiteration of 'suns' and 'summer', whereas a community of less competent readers might not. Semantic cohesion depends on a discourse community's communal associations across the lines of a poem, or across stretches of talk.
A sign or word may also relate to the other words and instances of text and talk that have accumulated in a community's memory over time, or prior text. Thus, to return, for example, to the Russian sign dusha, which roughly denotes 'a person's inner core', it connotes goodness and truth because it is linked to other utterances spoken and heard in daily life, to literary quotes (for example, 'His soul overflowing with rapture, he yearned for freedom, space, openness' written by Dostoevsky), or to other verbal concepts such as pricelessness, human will, inner speech, knowledge, feelings, thoughts, religion, that themselves have a variety of connotations. When English speakers translate the word dusha by the word 'soul', they are in fact linking it to other English words, i.e. 'disembodied spirit', 'immortal self, 'emotions', that approximate but don't quite match the semantic cohesion established for dusha in the Russian culture. The meanings of words cannot be separated from other words with which they have come to be associated in the discourse community's semantic pool.
Another linguistic environment within which words carry cultural semantic meaning consists of the linguistic metaphors that have accumulated over time in a community's store of semantic knowledge. Thus, for example, the English word 'argument' is often encountered in the vicinity of words like 'to defend' (as in 'Your claims are indefensible'), 'to shoot down' (as in 'He shot clown all of my arguments'), 'on target' (as in 'Her criticisms were right on target'), which has led George Lakoff and Mark Johnson to identify one of the key metaphors of the English language: 'Argument is War'. Some of these metaphors are inscribed in the very structure of the English code, for example, the metaphor of the visual field as container. This metaphor delineates what is inside it, outside it, comes into it, as in 'The ship is coming into view', 'I have him in sight', 'He's out of sight now'. Each language has its own metaphors that provide semantic cohesion within its boundaries.
In all these examples, the semantic meanings of the code reflect the way in which the speech community views itself and the world, i.e. its culture. They are intimately linked to the group's experiences, feelings and thoughts. They are the non-arbitrary expression of their desire to understand and act upon their world.
The non-arbitrary nature of signs
We said at the beginning that signs have no natural connection with the outside world and are therefore arbitrary. It is precisely this arbitrariness that makes them so amenable to appropriation by members of culturally embedded discourse communities. Speakers and writers use those signs that are most readily available in their environment, without generally putting them into question, or being aware, as Sapir noted, that other signifying relations might be available. As we noted in Chapter 1, socialization into a given discourse community includes making its signifying practices seem totally natural. Native users of a language, for example, do not view the linguistic sign as arbitrary; on the contrary, they view it as a necessity of nature. Jakobson reports the anecdote of one Swiss-German peasant woman who asked why the French used fromage for Kдse (cheese): 'Kдse ist doch viel natiirlicher!' ('Kдse is so much more natural!'), she added. Only detached researchers and non-native speakers see the relations between signs as mere contingence.
Native speakers do not feel in their body that words are arbitrary signs. For them, words are part of the natural, physical fabric of their lives. Seen from the perspective of the user, words and thoughts are one. For example, anyone brought up in a French household will swear that there is a certain natural masculinity about the sun (le soleil) and femininity about the moon (la lune). For English speakers, it is perfectly natural to speak of 'shooting down someone's argument'; they don't even think one could talk of arguments in a different way. Having once recognized the semantic cohesion of the Emily Dickinson poem, readers may even come to view the interpretation offered in Chapter 1 as the only one possible—the natural one. Even though, as we have seen, signs are created, not given, and combine with other signs to form cultural patterns of meaning, for native speakers linguistic signs are the non-arbitrary, natural reality they stand for.
The major reason for this naturalization of culturally created signs is their motivated nature. Linguistic signs do not signify in a social vacuum. Sign-making and sign-interpreting practices are motivated by the need and desire of language users to influence people, act upon them or even only to make sense of the world around them. With the desire to communicate a certain meaning to others comes also the desire to be listened to, to be taken seriously, to be believed, and to influence in turn other peoples' beliefs and actions. The linguistic sign is therefore a motivated sign.
Symbols
With the passing of time, signs easily become not only naturalized, but conventionalized as well. Taken out of their original social and historical context, linguistic signs can be emptied of the fullness of their meaning and used as symbolic shorthand. For example, words like 'democracy', 'freedom', 'choice', when uttered by politicians and diplomats, may lose much of their denotative and even their rich connotative meanings, and become political symbols in Western democratic rhetoric; signifiers like 'the French Revolution', 'May 68', 'the Holocaust', have simplified an originally confusing amalgam of historical events into conventionalized symbols. The recurrence of these symbols over time creates an accumulation of meaning that not only shapes the memory of sign users but confers to these symbols mythical weight and validity.
The passage of time validates both the sign itself and its users. For signs are reversible; they have the potential of changing the way sign-makers view themselves, and therefore the way they act. The use of signs enables current speakers to place past events into a current context of talk, i.e. to recontextualize past events and thus provide a framework to anticipate, i.e. precontextualize, future events. Ultimately such construction and reconstruction of contexts through the use of signs enables language users to control their environment, and to monitor their and others' behavior in that environment.
We see this controlling effect at work, for example, in the publicity logos, the advertisement jingles of commercial corporations, and in the outward signs of national patriotism, from flags to mottos to mementos. Cultural stereotypes are frozen signs that affect both those who use them and those whom they serve to characterize. Much of what we call ideology is, in this respect, symbolic language. For example, words like 'rebels' or 'freedom fighters' to denote anti-government forces, 'challenges' or 'problems' to denote obstacles, and 'collaboration' or 'exploitation' to denote workers' labor, are cultural symbols propagated and sustained by sign-makers of different political leanings in their respective discourse communities. The way in which language intersects with social power makes some uses of cultural signs seem legitimate, i.e. natural, others illegitimate, i.e. unnatural and even taboo. A right-wing newspaper, for example, would censor the use of 'freedom fighters' to refer to guerrilla forces; its readers would find it quite natural to see them referred to as 'rebels'.
This last example illustrates the problem encountered throughout this chapter of keeping semantics and pragmatics strictly separate from one another. Where does semantics end and pragmatics begin? The meanings of words as they are linked both to the world and to other words establish a speech community's pool of semantic resources; but this semantic pool is constantly enriched and changed through the use that is made of it in social contexts.
Summary
Signs establish between words and things various semantic relations of denotation, connotation, or iconicity that give general meaning to the world. In addition, signs establish semantic relations with other signs in the direct environment of verbal exchanges, or in the historical context of a discourse community. The creation of meaning through signs is not arbitrary, but is, rather, guided by the human desire for recognition, influence, power, and the general motivation for social and cultural survival. Since meaning is encoded in language with a purpose, meaning as sign is contingent upon the context in which signs are used to regulate human action. Thus it is often difficult to draw a clear line between the generic semantic meanings of the code and the pragmatic meanings of the code in various contexts of use.

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